The saint simply went about his daily life diffusing virtue as the stars diffuse light and the flowers scent, without being aware of it. The people, respecting his humility, followed him silently, never speaking to him about his miracles. Soon they even forgot his name, and called him “The Holy Shadow.”

This is the ultimate: one has to become the holy shadow, just a shadow of the divine. This is the greatest revolution that can happen to a human being: the transfer of the center. You are no longer your own center; the divine becomes your center. You live like its shadow. You are not powerful, because you don’t have any center to be powerful. You are not virtuous; you don’t have any center to be virtuous. You are not even religious; you don’t have any center to be religious. You are simply not, a tremendous emptiness, with no barriers and blocks, so the divine can flow through you unhindered, uninterpreted, untouched – so the divine can flow through you as he is, not as you would like him to be. He does not pass through your center – there is none. The center is lost.

This is the meaning of this sutra: that finally you have to sacrifice your center so you cannot think in terms of the ego again, you cannot utter “I” – to annihilate yourself utterly, to erase yourself utterly. Nothing belongs to you; on the contrary, you belong to the divine. You become a holy shadow.

It is difficult to conceive of it because it is so difficult to be unattached with useless rubbish. You go on collecting in the hope, as if whatsoever you accumulate can fulfill you. You go on accumulating – knowledge, money, power, prestige. You go on just accumulating. Your whole life is a stuffing in. And of course if you become a dead weight there is no wonder in it. That’s what you have been doing: collecting dust and thinking of it as if it is gold.

The valueless becomes of immense value if seen through the ego. The ego is a great falsifier, the great deceiver. It goes on lying to you, and it goes on creating illusions, dreams, projections. Watch it: It is very subtle. Its ways are subtle and it is very cunning. If you stop it in one direction, it moves in another direction. If you stop one path, it finds another path, and in such a cunning way that you cannot think that the other path is also of the ego.

I have heard about an old woman who had fallen down the stairs and broken her leg:

The doctor put it in a cast and warned her not to walk up and down the stairs. It finally mended after six months and the doctor announced the cast could be removed.

“Can I climb the stairs now ?” asked the old lady.

“Yes,” said the doctor.

“Oh, I am glad,” she giggled. “I am sick of going up and down the drainpipe.”

If you block the ego coming from the staircase, it comes from the drainpipe – but it comes!